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UX Cake

In our previous post, UX Cake: avoid the sharks, we talked about the UX Cake live podcast event co-sponsored by Allovus. The discussion covered how to prevent your UX review from getting derailed by “sharks.”

UX Cake is produced by Amplify Alliance, a UX coaching firm, and hosted by Leigh Allen-Arredondo. Leigh is a co-founder of Amplify Alliance, and a UX pro with over 20 years of experience in full-stack UX and UX teams, teaching, and coaching in Seattle.

As a follow-up to the article, here’s a short interview with Leigh Allen-Arredondo, host of UX Cake.

Kaitlin Flanigan: Can you please give an overview/description of the UX Cake podcast?

Leigh: UX Cake is a podcast for user experience professionals who want to be more effective and happy in their career. In every episode, we talk to experienced UX pros and industry insiders from around the globe for practical advice on how to increase the value of our work, and get the best outcomes for our teams, our users, and our UX careers. Our aim is to help our UX community become stronger and more effective, by sharing the experience and expertise from leaders in the field.

Kaitlin: What was your favorite part of the event?

Leigh: Personally, I was really excited that so much of the audience had listened to the UX Cake podcast, and I was really happy to connect with listeners who find the content helpful. I got great ideas for future episodes by talking to people about what concerns or issues they often face. Producing the podcast is a lot of work, and knowing that people find it useful is really encouraging. That’s why do it.

Kaitlin: Can you tell me about an experience you’ve had with “sharks” in a presentation setting and how you handled it/could’ve handled it differently?

Leigh: A few years ago, I sat in on a UX review of a relatively inexperienced UX designer showing wireframes to their product team, and it started to get rather brutal. The director was clearly frustrated and started attacking almost every detail. I had to suggest that we end the meeting and let the product team work some things out before having the review. A few things would have made a better outcome:

Review the work with the product team or at least the PM before having a larger review, in order to gain an important ally.

Understand what the team is expecting to see, and clearly and visually communicate what has changed since the last review.

Communicate where in the process the work is, what kind of feedback is needed in this meeting, and what the next steps are.